Rainer Reisenzein

Rainer Reisenzein received the PhD degree in psychology from the University of Salzburg, Austria. After spending a postdoctoral research year at the University of California Los Angeles, he was an assistant professor at the Free University Berlin and then at the University of Bielefeld. Since 2002, he has been a Full Professor of General Psychology at the University of Greifswald, Germany. His research focuses on theoretical and empirical questions related to emotion and motivation and is marked by an interdisciplinary orientation toward, in particular, philosophy (philosophy of science and philosophy of mind) and cognitive science. He has published numerous theoretical, review, and empirical articles and book chapters in English and German on diverse emotion-related topics, including emotional experience, emotion concepts, the facial expression of emotion, basic emotions, cognitive emotion theory, and the history of emotion. A special research focus is the phenomenon of surprise in humans, considered from the perspective of emotion theory. Rainer Reisenzein is a coauthor (with Wulf-Uwe Meyer und Achim Schützwohl) of a German three-volume introduction to the psychology of emotions. In 2009, he edited (together with the philosopher Sabine Döring) a special issue of Emotion Review on the topic of emotional experience. He is on the editorial board of the journals Emotion, Cognition and Emotion, and Experimental Psychology. His recent research interests are centered on elaborating a proposal for a computational model of the belief-desire theory of emotion.